In this collaborative project between Baylor University and the University of Washington, Dr. Jeffrey Herron and a to-be-determined bioengineering PhD student will be supporting a clinical study into the use of deep brain stimulation of the VC/VS to improve the treatment of bipolar depression. The primary aims of this project are to 1) collect preliminary safety and efficacy data pertaining to the use of VC/VS DBS for treatment-resistant bipolar depression (TRBD) in a 9 month open-label early feasibility study of 10 subjects, 2) develop methods and new composite scoring metrics to monitor study participant’s energy and mood levels to support the device programming, and finally 3) identify neural correlates of TRBD symptoms, energy, and mood to develop neural classifiers of patient state. In this project, the UW team will be responsible for developing a data pipeline and associated monitoring dashboard to enable clinical monitoring of participant status using deployed sensing systems. Additionally, over the full five years of the project the UW team will focus on ensuring data quality of the developed sensing systems, monitor their deployment in remote studies with study participants, develop analysis pipelines to support composite scores of behavior and neural biomarker identification, provide guidance on data collection practices using the Percept RC system, interface with industry to ensure delivery of adequate software for research use, and participate in manuscript preparation for results dissemination purposes.
Sponsor: NIH